ENGLAND
Church Times
June 22, 2018
By Hattie Williams
ALL Church of England clergy will be required by canon law to submit their name and ministerial authority to a new national register, assuming that the General Synod follows the recommendations of the National Safeguarding Steering Group (NSSG).
The group’s report, published on Friday, will be debated by the Synod when it meets in York next month.
The report also calls for a new policy on granting and renewing Permission To Officiate (PTO), a review of the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM), and new requirements to “strengthen suitability and selection” of candidates for all forms of ministry.
The report has been produced by the NSSG in response to safeguarding failures, concerns, and recommendations highlighted during the public hearing conducted by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (ICSA) in March. The hearing used the diocese of Chichester as a case-study to investigate the extent to which the Anglican Church had failed to protect children from sexual abuse.
The inquiry established that there is no public national database for the clergy besides Crockford’s Clerical Directory, which is incomplete since clerics can elect not to appear in it. Also, records of clerics with current or expired PTO, criminal records, and other concerns kept on file by dioceses tend to be incomplete, lost, ignored, or blighted by poor record-keeping.
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